Quotes from Helen Graham

The scale of these "cleansing executions" – judicial murder after summary trials – alarmed even Himmler who was visiting in October 1940, though obviously he was concerned not with the humanitarian issue but the wastage of much-needed "Aryan" labour.

most of the regime's practices, whether via direct repression or the punitive dimension which autarky inserted into everyday life, can be encapsulated as teaching the defeated the meaning of their defeat.15

The key to the Republic's enduring popular support lay not only in its most tangible reforms – in the areas of land, labour and welfare – crucial though these were for the redistribution of social and economic power. It also lay in a qualitative change, in the change of social atmosphere that it wrought

Integral to this was the regime's unchanging manichean discourse – i.e. its ideological and cultural discourse of the civil war as a battle of "morality vs. iniquity", of "martyrs against barbarians".

So we see the complex and contradictory motives that so often lay behind the apparently binary choices made by people in the wake of the rebellion. Indeed, this enforced reductiveness, the obligation to 'take sides', constitutes the coup's first, and most enduring, act of violence.

in the inland northern half of Spain, there was an ingrained hostility to Republican cultural values.

the role played by such individuals within the military trial system of the 1940s was as denouncers rather than witnesses – an important distinction.

clear parallel between Francoist judicial practice and that of the Nazis – in that both, unlike the Soviet case, overturned previous liberal jurisprudence/practice.

It was against this perceived threat to older ways of being and thinking that a fear-ridden patrician and also a populist crusade conservatism "rose" behind the coup of 17–18 July 1936.

el que no está preso, lo andan buscando

The military rebels issued secret orders dating back to April 1936 that indicated maximum force was to be used: this was violence as the end of the argument over constitutional reform.

imperial defeat turned the military into a powerful internal political lobby determined to find a new role while guarding against any loss of income or prestige in the interim.

For land and social welfare reforms cost money and the government was seeking to subsidize these by cutting the military establishment and thus its enormous salary bill.

The largest such project was the Canal del Bajo Guadalquivir, an immense irrigation project involving over five thousand slave labourers and which took twenty years to complete, in the interests of the same landowners who had backed the military coup of 1936.

Forced labourers undertook the construction and also the reconstruction of war-damaged roads, railways, dams, towns and other public infrastructure, as well as the building of Franco's own mausoleum

Soviet Russia was grudgingly admired by the Franco regime.

recouping the church subsidies was pivotal in the Republic's release of funds for other reforms, especially for (public) primary education.

As a result, there occurred periodic pardons (indultos) for civil war-related offences (though never for anything defined as post-war "crimes against the security of the state"). Tens of thousands of people were released by the mid 1940s. These pardons were necessary or the gaols would have caved in under the pressure

the idea of a crusade against social modernity was to be found not only in the market towns of north-central Castile, or in the remote rural north (most obviously among the theocratic and pugnacious Carlists of Navarre) but also in larger urban centres and the big cities, where Catholic youth became activists in the new mass organizations of the right.

a pardon did not mean a simple return to society, it meant entry to another penal regime, that of conditional liberty (libertad vigilada) – an exceptionally punitive form of parole via which the regime's control was extended further.

patrician conservatism, which included much of the Spanish officer corps, was by the early months of 1936 increasingly linked up to the self-proclaimed fascist right,

freedom of movement in 1940s Spain existed only as an exceptional political or social privilege: very few ordinary people escaped surveillance in a society in which travel anywhere required a safe conduct or pass from the authorities.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of Spain's fascist party, the Falange,

public declarations were made by local civilian elites in the rebel zone – whether bosses of the fascist Falange or people associated with the mass Catholic party, CEDA, or monarchist landowners or businessmen or clerics. These were made independently of each other and of the military authorities. But they were remarkably similar. Their message was that Spain needed to be purged or purified.